Thursday, December 31, 2009

While gossip mavens love to write about or read about the sexual and other private peccadillos of presidents of the United States, there is another aspect of presidential private lives that is much more pertinent in consideration of executive performance in our political history. That is the question of the medical (including the psychological) condition of the chief executive/commander-in-chief of the national armed forces, and the historical occurrence of secrecy and cover-up when a president is seriously or grievously ill.

Most of the time, the secrets come to light only after the term, or after the death, of a president.

The first presidential medical crisis was not a secret, nor a cover-up, but a case of colossal misjudgment. On inauguration day, March 4, 1841, newly-elected President William Henry Harrison (nicknamed “Tippecanoe” after the famous battle he had won as a general) decided to deliver his very long inaugural address on a bitterly cold Washington, DC day without an overcoat. He subsequently caught pneumonia, and a month later, died. (One might say it was the antithesis of a cover-up.) In any event, the Harrison campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!” was unexpectedly fulfilled when John Tyler became the first vice president in U.S. history to succeed prematurely, albeit constitutionally, to the presidency.

Numerous secret medical crises have confronted U.S. presidents since, including a possible undiagnosed case of Marfan’s Disease for Abraham Lincoln, the severe alcoholism of Andrew Johnson, the cover-up of Grover Cleveland’s secret surgery for cancer of the jaw on a naval battleship, Woodrow Wilson’s incapacitating stroke which made his wife the de facto president for almost two years, the circumstances in the sudden and premature death of Warren Harding, cover-ups of medical conditions and surgeries of Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, and the complete suppression of the facts by John F. Kennedy when he took office with then-fatal Addison’s Disease that had also made him, in effect, a drug addict.

But the latest revelation of presidential medical cover-ups may be the most serious of all of in historical risks and consequences for the nation.

“FDR Deadly Secret” by Steven Lomazow, M.D. and Eric Fettman (Public Affairs, 2010) is an extraordinary medical detective story that will force some re-evaluation of the nation’s longest-serving president. Roosevelt was sworn in for this fourth term on January 20, 1945. Less than two months later, the generally beloved “war president” (age only 63) died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his retreat at Warm Springs, Georgia, and Vice President Harry Truman took his place. Roosevelt’s physicians, including his primary caregiver, Rear Admiral Ross McIntyre, cited hypertension as the cause of death. Although Roosevelt’s physical condition had dramatically deteriorated since 1943, McIntyre and Roosevelt himself had repeatedly reassured the public that his health was good.

In fact, as authors Lomazow and Fettman conclusively demonstrate in their book, the president was grievously ill from 1940 on, and almost certainly knew most of the extent of his condition, as did the physicians taking care of him. Roosevelt’s immediate cause of death was the cerebral hemorrhage, and he did have severe (“uncontrolled” his physician admitted in 1970) hypertension, but Roosevelt’s underlying conditions of metastatic skin cancer (melanoma) and congestive heart failure were kept from public view for at least five years.

(Technically, although Lomazow is a distinguished neurologist and Fettman a very credible historical journalist, their contentions are theoretical, and they say so, because all pertinent medical records were destroyed or suppressed. Nevertheless, the first-hand testimony of so many involved, and the brilliant medical detective work of the authors makes their scenario accurate, in my opinion, beyond a reasonable doubt.)

In fact, on the day before (in 1944) when he informed the Democratic National Committee that he would run for the unprecedented fourth term, the book’s authors point out that Roosevelt had been told unambiguously and forcefully by his doctors that he could not survive a new term. Records of this do exist.

The precedent for the cover-up of his desperate medical condition, of course, had been set at the outset of his presidency when Roosevelt, his entourage, and the entire national media participated in the total cover-up of his paralysis following a bout with poliomyelitis in 1923. Hard as it may seem to believe today, most of the nation was unaware that the president of the United States was crippled. My father, a general practitioner and lifelong admirer of Roosevelt, first noticed this in October, 1932 when (New York) Governor Roosevelt passed through his home city of Erie, Pennsylvania on a campaign stop. Having succeeded in the most amazing (and for the media, willing) medical cover up in presidential history to that point, Roosevelt no doubt felt that he could succeed in a much more serious cover-up a decade later.

The authors of “FDR’s Deadly Secret” are telling a medical story, and as admirers of Roosevelt the politician, but they cannot avoid the conclusion that the president’s fourth term bid was a fraud from its outset, and a terrible risk for a nation still at war. They also point out that, contrary to popular opinion, Roosevelt wanted to keep Vice President Henry Wallace (a far leftist and a mystic) on the ticket in 1944. Roosevelt only agreed to name Truman after he was informed that the Democratic convention would likely refuse to renominate Wallace, or at the least, it would split the Democratic Party. His choice of Truman, the evidence suggests, was not because Roosevelt foresaw Truman as the excellent president he became, but because Truman would be the most acceptable to the convention and likely to hold the party together.

The book suggests that Roosevelt was informed that he had a malignant melanoma inlate circa 1940. A large mole on his forehead had appeared in the 1920’a, but hadundergone acute changes circa 1939. Photographs in the book show the changing mole and its disappearance (by surgery) over the next two years. Although there was no autopsy of the president in 1945, and no records of a melanoma diagnosis survive, the book plausibly shows that this deadly skin cancer had probably spread to the president’s brain and stomach prior to the 1944 election.

Furthermore, the authors conclusively prove that Roosevelt had been diagnosed with never-publicly disclosed congestive heart disease in this same period, and that he had a series of undisclosed heart “events”, also prior to 1944. This book also reveals that the president spent much of his last year and a half in office sleeping up to 12-18 hours a day, and only occasionally fully engaged in his duties. His physicians, staff, colleagues and family all participated in a massive concealment of Roosevelt’s condition although only the president himself and three or four physicians caring for him knew the whole extent of his illnesses.

As is well-known, Roosevelt only met with Truman privately once after January 20, 1945, and that the vice president was mostly in the dark about many issues facing the nation at war after his nomination, including most notoriously, the existence of the top-secret Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bomb. A few months after taking office and learning about the secret bomb project, Truman had to make the momentous decision of whether to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.

In recent years, a number of biographies of Roosevelt and other histories of his era, most notably Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent “No Ordinary Time” (1994), have increasingly mentioned in passing Roosevelt’s medical “secrets” and a few of them have cited reports of a possible melanoma, noting the disappearance of the mole over FDR’s left eyebrow. Some of these books have also analyzed the impact of the heart disease on Roosevelt’s executive performance, particularly at Yalta. Lomazow and Fettman’s book, however, is the first to concentrate on the medical facts, and to trace the evidence to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” conclusion of the skin cancer metastasis as both the principle cause of FDR’s dramatic physical decline and death. That new material, plus the exhaustive demonstration of amassive cover up that has continued to the present day, is what makes this book so valuable.

By today’s standards, all of this cover-up is unthinkable, and with the frequent appearances of a president live and on camera, close to impossible. In 1945, my father who, as I previously noted, had met Roosevelt briefly in 1932, had become commandant of the base army hospital (Arlington Hall) at General Marshall’s headquarters in Virginia. Although he treated Marshall and his wife on occasion, my father did not treat the president, nor did he see him up close in person. But he did see him in newsreels, and he remarked then to my mother and later to me that he knew Roosevelt was very ill. And so did intuitively virtually all who met with him from 1943-44 on, especially those who had known Roosevelt before the war. Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s own insistence, and that of his personal physicians, convinced most to accept that his ghastly appearance was simply the result of fatigue and the stresses of the war and his duties as president.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a major president in American history. He developed an unprecedented bond with a majority of voters while in office as a result of his efforts during the Depression of the 1930’s. He skillfully guided the nation into its role as the defender of democracy and Western civilization before and after December 7, 1941. A case can be made that he was the indispensable man to be president for a third term in 1941 when the rest of the world was at war. In late, 1944, however, with the war clearly coming to an end, he was no longer indispensable, and his inability function daily as president put the nation and our war effort at huge risk. His performance at the Yalta Conference in 1944 has been virtually universally criticized. The failure of this Conference, many contend, prolonged the ensuing Cold War (which ended finally in 1991). The current constitutional limit of two terms was instituted following FDR’s terms.

As the case of President Franklin Roosevelt and this book show, anyone in the most powerful executive position in the free world too long is likely to lose his or her good judgment.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Brave little Honduras has become the modern David, teaching the Goliath nations of our time an inspiring message about the power of freedom, and the endurance of democratic capitalism when faced with formidable obstacles. The recent free elections in the Central American nation have ended a prolonged crisis when its elected president decided to defy the Honduran constitution and stay in power beyond the time legitimately allowed.

When he did this, he not only violated a specific constitutional law, he automatically defaulted on his claim to office. To their credit, the Honduran congress and supreme court acted promptly to remove him, per the constitutional mandate, and replace him with an interim government headed by someone from his own party.

They did make one mistake, however. Instead of jailing the deposed president and trying him for his crime, the interim government acted wisely and humanely by sending him out of the country. They did this to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, and to ease the transition to a new government following an immediately-scheduled free election.

Apparently, acting wisely and humanely is not a good course in today’s world. Sr. Zelaya, the deposed president, is a neo-Marxist, anti-democratic politician who sought to establish a totalitarian regime in Honduras, imitating the regimes of his friends and allies in Cuba, Venzeuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. He took advantage of the generosity of the Honduran interim government to try to bully his way back to power, using misinformation and other propaganda to assist him. There was no surprise when his totalitarian friends backed him, alleging wrongly that a military coup had removed him, but there was a surprise when U.S. President Obama joined this unholy cabal to call for his reinstatement. The financial influence of the U.S. over Honduras is immense, and many observers in the U.S. and world media expected the interim government (and the majority of the Honduran people who backed it) to cave in.

But brave little Honduras did not cave in. The interim government acted impeccably and kept their promise to hold the immediate election. Sr. Zelaya called on his supporters to boycott the election, but the voter turnout was apparently greater than the previous election in which Zelaya had won! The candidate from Zelaya’s party lost, but he acted graciously and patriotically in embracing the victor, a conservative farmer/businessman who won with more than 50% of the large turnout. The various international organizations and leaders which had supported Zelaya were faced by an undisputedly fair and free election, and many of them have now rallied to the president-elect.

The usual totalitarian suspects, of course, still make laughable claims for Sr. Zelaya. President Lula of Brazil, an emerging and successful new economic power in South America, unfortunately has continued his support of Zelaya, disappointing many of his own Brazilian supporters, as well as his admirers in the rest of the world. As long as he continues to do so, and to shelter Sr. Zelaya in its embassy in Tegucigalpa, Brazil is wasting a superb opportunity to show that its recent economic success (as a capitalist democracy) merits leadership in the political life of the Western Hemisphere.

The free world owes the congress, supreme court and interim government of Honduras a very large debt for its courageous leadership, and the Honduran people for their indomitable resistance to threatening tyranny.

Meanwhile, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have wisely accepted the reality of Honduran politics, and finally broken with their totalitarian co-conspirators. They have endorsed the election results, and say they will resume normal relations with Honduras.

The U.S. radical left, of course, is disappointed. But even the Old Media, which had apologized and rationalized the original U.S. policy, is rapidly reversing itself. Perhaps most notable of this phenomenon is the current and embarrassing attempt by that lame duck of American journalism, The Washington Post, to fill its op ed columns and editorials with absurd “Animal Farm” revisionism that claims the Obama policy was right all along. Since I am a long-time admirer of the outstanding Post media critic Howard Kurtz, I hope he is allowed to write about this latest lapse of journalistic integrity and credibility at his newspaper.

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About Barry Casselman

BARRY CASSELMAN is an author, journalist and lecturer who has reported and analyzed American presidential and national politics since 1972.

He founded, edited and published his first newspaper when he was 29. He has been a contributor to many national publications, including The Weekly Standard, realclearpolitics.com, Politico, Roll Call, Washington Examiner, The American Interest, Utne Reader, Campaigns and Elections Magazine, American Experiment Quarterly, Washington Times, The Rothenberg Political Report, Business Today, Election Politics, Business Ethics Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Washington Insider, and American Commonwealth.

His regular op ed columns and other commentary in print, and on the internet, are distributed through the Preludium News Service. His blog ‘The Prairie Editor” has an international readership and appears on his website at www.barrycasselman.com .

He was a political analyst for WCCO-AM (CBS) for several years, for KSJN-AM (Public Radio International), and for KUOM-AM (National Public Radio). He has also broadcast on RAE in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and beginning in 2000, he produced and broadcast for Voice of America. In 2006, he presented news commentary on LBC, the independent 24-hour news radio network in London, England. He also provided election night analysis in 2006 for Minnesota Public Radio. In 2008, he returned to WCCO-AM for periodic national election commentary. Beginning in 2011, he began weekly commentary on the 2012 presidential campaign on a national radio podcast program originating in Dallas, TX.

Casselman was the original host of “Talk To Your City” on the Minneapolis Television Network, and was a frequent political commentator for KTCA-TV (PBS). In 1992 and 1994, he presented election night analysis for the Conus coast-to-coast All News Channel. In 1996, he provided live coverage from the presidential primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire for All News Channel nationwide. He has also appeared on C-SPAN. In 2008, he was interviewed by ABC-TV Evening News with Charles Gibson.

He has covered national presidential primaries, caucuses and straw polls since 1976, and attended Democratic and Republican national conventions since 1988. He has traveled throughout the United States to report on significant political events, including the national congressional debate in Williamsburg in 1996, the presidential debates, national conventions and events of the Democratic Leadership Council, Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, United We Stand America, Reform Party, National Governors Association, NAACP, AFL-CIO, Christian Coalition, CPAC, Green Party and the Independence Party.

In 2012, he was invited to be a civilian participant in the 58th annual seminar on national security at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA. Also in 2012, he was a speaker at the Jefferson Educational Society's Global Summit IV. At that event, he received the Thomas Hagen "Dignitas" Award for lifetime achievement.

From 1990-2011, he was the executive director of the non-profit International Conference Foundation, and hosted more than 500 world leaders, foreign journalists and other international visitors. At the non-partisan Foundation, he also organized four national symposia: the first on low-income housing with then-HUD Secretary Jack Kemp; the second, a highly-acclaimed conference on “Locating the New Political Center in America” with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and leading spokespersons of the Clinton administration as well as newly-emerged independent groups; the third, a symposium on public communications with then-Governor Tom Ridge, former White House press secretary Mike McCurry, Tony Blankley and other national figures; and in 2003, a symposium on homeland security with Secretary Ridge and leading local and national experts. During this time, he also organized numerous smaller conferences, tours and events for the U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. Department of State for its International Visitor Program and its Foreign Press Center programs. In 2008, he organized a special program for international media and visitors attending the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The Foundation also sponsored programs presenting domestic and international authors and their books.

In 2007, Mr. Casselman helped create and plan the nationally-broadcast and podcast dialogue between former New York Governor Mario Cuomo and former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich at the Cooper Union in New York City, and he continued to work on related debate and public policy discussion projects in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Mr. Casselman has been a lecturer on public policy at Princeton University’s annual international business conferences in New York, and its regional conferences in Chicago since 2005; He also has been a guest lecturer at George Washington University, Carleton College, The Chautauqua (NY) Institution, Gannon University, Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Santa Barbara City College, University of St. Thomas, Metropolitan State University, Augsburg College, University of Minnesota, Jefferson Educational Society, and on the international voyages of the Queen Elizabeth 2, Sagafjord, Vistafjord and Royal Viking Sun. He has made presentations on journalism and the arts at Carleton College, University of Minnesota, College of St. Catherine, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Walker Art Center, Metropolitan State University, Mercyhurst College and the Brazilian Writers Union in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

His non-fiction book North Star Rising was published in 2007 by Pogo Press, an imprint of Finney Company. In 2008, Pogo Press published Minnesota Souvenir, Casselman’s history and visitor guide for the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. He was editor and co-author of the book Taking Turns: Political Stalemate or a New Direction in the Race for 2012, a preview of that year's national election.

He has been cited in Michael Barone’s Almanac of American Politics and in William Safire’s Political Dictionary. Casselman has invented a number of political words and phrases which are now in frequent usage, and listed in various online dictionaries.

He is also a widely-published American poet, short story writer and playwright whose work has been translated and published in Europe, South America and Asia. He is the author of four published books of literary prose and poetry. His work has been frequently anthologized. Two of his plays, in collaboration with composer Randall Davidson, have been performed by the Actors Theater of St. Paul, Minnesota Orchestra, St. Donat’s Ensemble of Wales, and by independent productions at the Union Depot in St. Paul and the Foss Theater at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. He has provided original texts for two award-winning experimental films, as well as texts for other independent short films and videos.

Barry Casselman was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. with major honors from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has also studied in Paris, and attended the University of Madrid. He now lives in Minneapolis.